As webmasters, we want people to spend as much time as humanly possible on our sites. This is both the mark of a loyal customer and it improves the odds that they’ll make a purchase of either one of your products or a product which you are promoting. The more content of yours which someone reads, the more credibility which they will give to you and the more trust which you will develop from that visitor. But how can we encourage people to spend more time on your site? There are more ways to do this than you may realize at first, so here are 5 ways to keep people on your site.
Keep People on Your Site
Avoid Pop Ups – I KNOW I’m a hypocrite on this site by advising you to avoid pop ups when I use them myself. This post isn’t titled how to market to your site’s visitors, however. Pop ups don’t bother everyone, but they certainly bother a portion of your audience; there’s no way around that. Sometimes people will be so turned off at the site of a pop up that they’ll immediately exit your site. Sure there are better ways to use pop ups than others, but you still run that risk.
By eliminating pop up use altogether on your site, you’re assured not to offend anyone who comes through.
Great Content – This one is so obvious I almost feel guilty including it, but it’s so important I can’t leave it out. Having great content on your site is paramount in keeping people on your site (and developing a readership and making any money online and building your email list and… you get the idea). Make sure your content is unique in some way as well as informative or entertaining (or both).
Reduce Loading Time – The more content which you have on your website, the longer it’s going to take to load. Not everyone has the latest state of the art internet connections, so you should make it a priority to offload any non essential content. This means unloading plugins you don’t use anymore, emptying your cache often, keep your images stored off of your hosting account if you have a lot of them, or even upgrade your hosting account.
Include Relevant Post Links – Don’t forget to link to relevant posts whenever it’s appropriate. This is also a good way to spread some internal link juice when you use your anchor text effectively. There are even WordPress plugins which are able to find relevant posts based on the keywords which you use in the post which you are writing. The plugins then add links to those relevant posts at the bottom of your current posts so people can naturally find more content on that topic if they so choose once they get to the end of that current article.
Site Design – Site design is very important for determining how your visitors traverse and eventually exit your site. You want your site design to be simple to navigate first and foremost so that your visitor can easily find what it is that they are looking for. Including a search bar on every page is helpful for that. If it’s too difficult for your visitor to find what they want then they’ll quickly take off in frustration.
You should also look at what their exit options are. Are you using paid advertising like Adwords or in text advertising like Infolinks? I don’t like Adwords myself and think there are far better and less intrusive ways to monetize your site which I strongly recommend if you’re interested in making money from your site.